When the economy is growing and consumers happily spend all their money, “eye-catching”, dubious “professional-looking” charts seem to make sense in the grand scheme of a resource-wasting economy. But under recession, and on the threshold of a long economic Winter, those miscast charts are just bad jokes that should be banished from every book, every magazine, every meeting room.

In a recession, “do more with less” is everyone’s motto. Cut jobs. Cut travel expenses. Make people work harder.

That’s why Tufte is basically right, and so is Stephen Few and everyone who believes that information visualization is not a futile exercise of impression management with the sole purpose of showing off canned effects in a PowerPoint presentation. Tufte advocates a simple set of rules for better information visualization – the corporate world loves to do exactly the opposite. Until now. But can organizations afford to be inefficient (= lower return on investment) when dealing with expensive data? Can a lean organization leave junk in its management reports and presentations?

I know, the economy will not grow again just because of better business information visualization. But take a visualization rich report like these ones, imagine an eye-catching-flying-3D-pie-charts version and answer this simple question: when in recession, which one would you choose?

This chart looks nice on the first view. It makes nice use of muted colors, the shapes look well balanced and certainly the graphic designer did a good job. However, from a data visualization perspective this chart has a couple of flaws.

“Among the growing family of visual analytic tools, treemap are flourishing in organizations that require daily monitoring of complex activities with thousands of products, projects, or salespeople. Tabular reports, bar charts, line graphs, and scattergrams are important tools, but for complex activities where there are numerous sales regions, manufacturing plants, or product lines the hierarchical structures provided by treemaps can be helpful. While tabular displays and spreadsheets can show 30-60 rows at a time on typical displays, the colorful presentations in treemaps can accommodate hundreds or thousands of items in a meaningfully organized display that allows patterns and exceptions to be spotted in seconds.[…] Treemaps are a space-filling approach to showing hierarchies in which the rectangular screen space is divided into regions, and then each region is divided again for each level in the hierarchy.”

The first problem the NYT chart has is that it does not visualize the hierarchy as rectangular areas. The inflation drivers are visualized as asymmetric round shapes. It is difficult to compare the relative size of rectangular shapes but it gets almost impossible for asymmetric shapes. Also does this treemap lack labels for the smaller inflation drivers.

Sean published in his blog post a treemap which does not have the problems mentioned above:

Ben designed treemaps to visualize thousands of regions, products, etc ; but the Inflation chart only comprises 20 Inflation Drivers grouped into 7 categories. A simple sorted table would do a better job communicating the numbers as Kaiser Fung from Junk Junks wrote in his post.

This is already quite an improvement on the treemap, as we can see increasing and decreasing inflation trends and sparklines rather than traffic light colors as in the tree map version. Also it is much easier to read for non expert users.

Some minor things we can improve in Sean’s chart are:

We can sort the inflation drivers by Weight, to have the most important ones at the top

Changing the area to the sparkline puts emphasis on the trend rather than the absolute value of the values (as the area chart does)

Inline deviation charts allow us to visualize the MoM and YoY % changes

Well, since you are reading this, I’ll assume that you took the red pill, so let’s keep moving and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.

We saw that people usually design charts larger than they need to be. Why? Is it because we can’t fit the data into a smaller space? No, it isn’t. It is because in smaller charts there is no room for non-data elements, like title, legend, grid lines. In the dominant “Excel chart defaults” school of thinking data is not a priority.

This is a simple exercise that you can try safely at home and demonstrates it clearly. Start by creating a line chart in Excel, like this one:

You can see the data, right? Now make the chart smaller:

Here is a fierce territorial competition, and guess who’s winning? Make the chart a little smaller:

The title and the legend win, as usual. The data must be here somewhere, but who cares?

This chart size is not large enough. Or so it seems. But what happens when we remove some non-data elements? Since we don’t need the legend, and we can put the title somewhere else, we can remove both:

We are getting our data back! Let’s just leave the data and a simple grid line:

I used MicroCharts to display the same data using both a line and a column chart:

With MicroCharts, you can add a “normal band” or a reference line that helps you to understand how the data departs from the expected values.

The above charts show percentage change on previous period GDP at market prices in the US (1980-2009). Here is the same data for some selected countries in the EU:

Michelangelo said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free“. Like him, keep carving your chart until you set your data free. The essence of a chart is the patterns you discover, buried under all the junk. By making your charts smaller you are force to remove that junk.

A richer, more detailed picture, is a solid foundation for your decision-making processes. But to add detail you need a higher resolution display device (be that a computer screen or a sheet of paper), as we saw in the previous post.

You take the red pill, accept Tufte’s advice and you’ll get more insights from your data

You take the blue pill, buy the stuff most vendors want you to buy and you stay under the illusion of the “professional looking chart”;

Let me detail the blue pill option. According to a large majority of vendors, we should get higher and higher resolutions, yes, but only to admire how eye-catching their products are, how well rendered, even if they display less and less actual data points. For the untrained eye, they may look like a Ferrari, but there’s a Tata underneath.

In reality, vendors and knowledgeable users have different agendas. Users want higher screen resolution to accommodate more data, while vendors want it because it makes they products look… “cool”? Apparently, in the mass market, form and function are strange to each other.
Let me exemplify the problem with a typical pie chart. I already gave my two cents for the never ending discussion around the sins and virtues of pie charts, so I will not do it again soon.

What I want to emphasize is that you can’t have more than five or six data points in a pie chart, but if you add texture to make it glow you will need to remove some data points and enlarge the chart. You need more space (= larger charts) in order for texture to be noticed, and there goes better (for efficient) information visualizations.

Unlike scientific visualization (that usually creates digital models of objects), information visualization focus on abstract concepts, like “inflation rate” or “market share”. You can’t add texture to market share. A chart is a “metaphoric space” where some objects (points, lines, rectangles) stand for an abstract concept, and we infer something from their relative positions in space.

So, you have a large, high-resolution computer monitor and also a high end color printer. You have the option between texture and detail. You can’t have both. Choosing detail you are focusing on the data and how to squeeze the juice out of it. Choosing texture you are adopting a marketing posture whereby you are not selling insights, you are selling yourself (it is an option, and some times you’ll need it). Or worse, in your naivety, you believe that information visualization is just a glowing 3D pie chart. Believe me, it is not.

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Our mission is to connect business users to data such that an average Excel user can build his budgeting application, enterprise dashboard or data warehouse reporting with Excel. Such a solution can span from a simple Excel reporting that pulls data from a sheet database using lookup functions to a full fledged enterprise dashboard that sources data from an OLAP cube & can be browsed interactively in the web.

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